Doing a reclassification exercise (job evaluation) is an extensive project which you probably should get a consultant who is knowledgeable on the process to assist you. It requires ensuring you have up to date job descriptions for each employee and that in itself is not always easy. That could involve interviewing staff and asking managers and staff to sign off on these new JD's before you can use them.

Once that part is done, there are various methodologies, in the past I used PWC to do our job evaluation exercise but depending on the size of your firm you could employ a small organization to support you through the process.

I would certainly recommend that you train a small multi disciplinary team to ensure that after the exercise is over, you have skills transferred to the organization. You will have appeals and future jobs to score and grade, this team would be able to do that for the foreseeable future and it is added skills for the members.

Wish you luck, I would not recommend going this alone if you have never done it before.

First a declaration of interest - we provide Job Evaluation consultancy and a web Factor-based JE System. As an earlier poster said, you cannot define grades etc validly without a job evaluation of some form. Traditional JE has also been very expensive, time consuming and still largely subjective. If the process depends on a written Job Description to be evaluated by others, the process falls at the first hurdle - the JD becomes a work of fiction aimed at securing a certain JE result! Contemporary factor based schemes operate differently. The job holder with the job holder's manager (and even a union representative if desired) answer specific and objective questions about the demands of the job. The questionnaires are adaptive in that the questions asked depend on the answers to prior questions. The process is efficient and defensible as there is a complete audit trace of questions and answers and the final evaluation is an objective derivative of those answers against a transparent model. Result - relatively quick, objective, defensible, transparent evaluation that actively involved the relevant players without demanding highly skilled job analysts.

There is no one single place you can salary grade and there is definitely no accurate grade as organizations review this periodically due to inflation and other economic factors.

Flowing from Lorman's comment, you need to review and align all job profiles and do a extensive job evaluation (we use JE Manager from the Hay Group) where you weight and rank each job.

What can also help you is for your organization to participate in remuneration/salary surveys where you can benchmark your organization's salary bands along side caparator/similar companies. This will also give you a view of what market anchor your organization currently is and if there is a need to review your bands. I can send you a sample to view but it may not be relevant to your company or industry.

Let's assume that we have the best JE tool in the universe, and as a result
it is possible to create an internal ranking of all jobs within the
organization, but, and there is always a but, that doesn't confirm to the
labour market which operates by different set of rules. Often enough you
find yourself with a conflict between the internal justice and the external
world. An extreme example is in the army where a platoon commander is
evaluated, internally, higher than a programmer say, but the latter is
relatively scarce in the market. Resolving such conflicts is the job of HR.

A good JE must establish the compensable factors which the organization establishes. Compensable factors vary from one organization to the other. These compensable factors will now be the bases of rating the various jobs. The rating scale must be used for all the job titles covered by the JE; same thing for the compensable factors.

After rating all the jobs, then you will have the job classification. The key here is the rating session conducted. The people involved in the rating must not be biased. Your role as the HR is material during the rating session. You must be on the lookout for biases. Remember, you are not rating the incumbent of the position but rather the worth of the job itself.

After that, the salary scale will be developed. This salary scale must be market driven to make it competitive. There is no such thing as perfect salary scale. Don't go for that; you will not be able to find it. However, though it is market driven, you have to take into account the capability of your organization in leveling up the salary scale to that of the prevailing market salary. This is where the differences will come into play.